måndag 16 december 2013

Why Skeptics Soon Will Stop Quarreling

There are many brands of skepticism to CO2-alarmism, from "deniers" and "slayers" to "lukewarmers", which have been quarreling with each other frantically over the years, while there is only one brand of climate alarmism. How can it be?

This is probably because there may be many aspects which are wrong and thus to be skeptic about, in a message of alarm based on incorrect physics. There is no reason to quarrel about the exact formulation of a false statement, as long as the falseness itself is not an issue. But there may be many ways in which a false statement is wrong and to express what is the biggest error may be, and has been, stirring up quarrel.

This can be avoided by understanding that it is the union of all errors which forms the totality of skepticism, not the intersection with a least common denominator of error. As alarmism is now collapsing, I think skeptics will be led away from internal quarrels into more of unification, which however will not serve any real purpose, because CO2-alarmism is dead anyway, thanks to the choir of all different brands of skeptics.

2 kommentarer:

I don't really think there is only one kind of warmist. Because it is a political movement, they cannot afford to disagree in public, but in private it's a different matter, as the Climategate e-mails show.

From my point of view, as a layman, I think the endless bickering over the greenhouse effect(s) is probably due to the fact that it seems poorly defined or based in fundamental physics, and this opens up for all kinds of alternative explanations and/or falsification attempts.

BTW it is also my view that the political climate movement started long before there was any science in place to back it. As some have put it, it was a movement in search of a science, not vice versa.

As Richard Lindzen sarcastically put it, the "consensus" was in place long before anyone knew what the consensus was about.

Could be that there is always some political movement in search of justification, be it racial discrimination and exploitation, sterilization or Lebensraum, but in the case of CO2 alarmism the justification came from scientists and scientific societies and without that the politics would have been dead, as dead as politics in our time based on astrology. But there was no science of CO2 warming and the whole spectacle developed into a tragedy for real science, the consequences of which are still to be cashed in.